To answer McCann’s question

Yes. I will keep putting up new posts on here, though not likely as regularly.

I don’t really know what to tell you anymore about the end of the trip. Oxford. Kensington.

Oxford was beautifully old. The walls around each college stood strong and protecting each hidden community.  They hid from me who knows what.  Lakes. Castles. Dragons. Dreams. Worlds I’ll never see. For all I know behind one set of walls was an entire underground city with a fake glass city built on top of it. Behind another wall could be a city run entirely by wafflepeople.  Who knows what ancient civilizations still live behind each walled city? Though behind one wall I suspect I saw Gondor. There was a tree high up on a hill in front of a building. I can only assume it was the White Tree, the Tree of the King.

Sunday was perfect weather.  The air was warm, a brisk autumn-feeling calm as the wind tossed leaves across the grass.  A boy loudly counting backwards from ten as his parents watch on and I from the distance watch him reach one and shout “BLAST OFF!” He jumps once, but missed and jumped again and his nerf rocket shot up a few feet into the air. I follow the signs that kindly point me to my childhood love and friend. There he is atop a narrowing stack of rocks covered in fairies, bunnies, and squirrels. His sweet face looking off toward the sky to Neverland. My love Peter Pan standing there reminding me what it is to be a little girl. Smile on my face I stare up him silently thanking him for reminding me, thanking him for teaching me to dream, expanding my imagination, and taking me away from the world. I walk passed tree after tree, knotty and turned. Two boys playing football in the park with their dad. One boy plays goalie as the other struggles against his father to get the ball back.  When the boy is in possession of the ball the dad accidentally trips the boy and kicks it a bit hard at the boys face.  The boy goes to block the ball with his hands to protect his face.  His dad yells, “Hands! My ball!” and kicks the ball away. How could I not laugh?

The next morning was a train ride to the airport and then back across the pond.

It feels a bit like I never left. That my fatigue is a result of my cold and has nothing to do with the fact that I’m weary from all that time away from the people I love so much or the drastic change in time. The air feels heavier here. I feel heavier, like my arms will drop off from the weight of them, that my shoulders are hunched from the weight of the air. The only thing keeping my head there is the stream of movies shot in Ireland that are playing on HBO. The cold is threatening and uninviting. The snow seems fake like I’m walking around in a Fort Wayne snowglobe, trapped.  I don’t know when or if I’ll ever get to go back, but I hope some day I can. Maybe then it will feel like I have actually been there.